The Wanderer reading room
Idle RPGs, MMOs, browser games and mobile RPGs, taken apart properly. Every review carries a score out of 10, what the game does well, what it does badly, and the kind of player it is actually for.
Devsisters folds its 300-million-player Cookie Run cast into an idle auto-battler with genuinely tactical positioning, then hangs the whole thing on the same gacha currencies that turned Cookie Run: Kingdom into a case study in monetisation backlash.
6.5 / 10
A dice-based deckbuilding roguelike that swaps Slay the Spire's card hand for a diamond grid of rollable dice, and mostly proves the swap was worth making — though a shorter campaign and some uneven early rewards keep it from the genre's very top tier.
8 / 10
A survival-automation game that makes terraforming the actual win condition instead of a late-game side quest, tying every conveyor belt and machine you build to a planet visibly coming back to life around it.
7.5 / 10
A solo developer's second attempt at an idle dungeon-crawler swaps out the save-corrupting mess of the original for a genuinely deep six-hero, four-party build system — but the review sample is still small, and the rough edges that sank the first game haven't all been sanded off.
6.5 / 10
A 20-minute survival roguelite that lets you rebuild your creature from over 125 evolutions every run, wrapped in a living ecosystem where you're just as often the prey as the predator — sharp and addictive early, but the same handful of builds start resurfacing once the novelty wears off.
7 / 10
Read review of Everything is Crab: The Animal Evolution Roguelite
Emeteria's debut turns into a fluid, chain-reacting sphere and reshuffles reality around you, and that idea alone is worth the price. The kicking-things-off-ledges combat underneath it never catches up.
7 / 10
A coin-flipping incremental that dresses up Cookie Clicker's core loop in casino iconography, then undercuts its own momentum with a broken mid-tier economy and a prestige system that punishes curiosity.
6.5 / 10
A voxel colony sim that lets you build up and down instead of just sideways — vaulted keeps, buried cellars, and structural stability all become real design problems. Going Medieval left Early Access after nearly five years with a genuine endgame bolted on, and mostly earns it.
8 / 10
Bluehood Games' incremental mining sim nails the first ten hours — hand-mining gives way to smelteries, upgrade trees and a claimable world map of parallel dig sites at a fair one-time price. The prestige layer that's supposed to carry the back half is where players keep hitting a wall.
7.5 / 10
A free grid-placement idle game about squeezing adjacency bonuses out of factories, power plants and research labs — a genuinely interesting core idea let down by CPU-hungry building animations, a map you can't scroll, and content that most players clear in an afternoon.
5.5 / 10
A Plinko-style incremental where every gumball you shoot is a physics object bouncing off gears for cash — a review of whether two hours of one-more-round number-go-up is worth the price of a coffee.
7.5 / 10
A free browser and Steam idler that swaps cookie-clicker simplicity for Path of Exile-style affix hunting, guild-like Syndicates and a marketplace — then leaves its own community to sell the experience as much as the systems do.
7 / 10
SUPERita's solo debut turns the incremental genre inside out — instead of walking away and letting numbers climb, you're stuck in a shrinking arena with a collapsing ceiling, spending loot on a talent tree and four companions between waves of monsters guarding a dragon's lair.
7.5 / 10
A pixel-art village-builder that wants to be an idle game and a management sim at once, and spends its first year of updates finding out how hard it is to be both without either side suffering.
5.5 / 10
A Norse-mythology MMORPG with genuinely impressive Unreal Engine 5 production values, undercut by a blockchain-token economy that turns nearly every meaningful upgrade into a real-money or crypto-market transaction.
4.5 / 10
A first-person idle dungeon crawler that sells you the whole game once, then gets out of the way — its classless skill system and guild-building give it real depth, even if its offline expeditions undersell the "idle" in the title.
7.5 / 10
A $2.99 voice-controlled spell duel that turned a solo developer's Early Access experiment into one of 2025's biggest indie surprises — a year on, the novelty has mostly held, but the update cadence and the mic's grasp of accents have not kept pace.
7 / 10
A factory-automation puzzle game where you cut, stamp, and paint your own voxel building parts, then squeeze the whole production line onto a sky island with a real, paid ceiling on space. Polished and distinctive, but priced like the genre giants it can't yet match in scale.
7 / 10
A solo developer's first-person melee roguelike spent two and a half years in Early Access before its 1.0 finally gave the combat a story worth finishing and a boss worth building toward.
8 / 10
A top-down sandbox RPG that spent six years in Early Access building the one system that actually separates it from the Terraria-likes around it — recruit settlers, hand them jobs, and your colony keeps working while you're off fighting something in a cave.
8 / 10
A free semi-idle RPG that builds a genuinely deep class-and-itemization sandbox — six classes, twelve specializations, three layers of gear tinkering — and then locks most of it behind a level-35 wall where the gold and rune economy stops keeping up.
6.5 / 10
A three-to-four-hour premium incremental about harvesting nodes and defending against waves of invaders, built with a hard ending instead of an infinite number-go-up treadmill — and popular enough to spawn an entire micro-genre of imitators.
8 / 10
Barrel Smash Studios' two-person Early Access debut drowns the world and asks you to build a colony on whatever's still floating — rafts, sinking islands, shark attacks and a corporate conspiracy buried in scavenged bunkers, all wrapped around a Rimworld-flavoured survivor sim.
7.5 / 10
A one-person incremental where you orbit a planet, drill it out from a laser turret, and work through four hazard-themed seasons to reach the core — a chill, cheap loop with a travel-time problem the developer never quite solves.
6.5 / 10
